Disclaimer: The content of this entry if used incorrectly can be seen to be foolish and childish. In addition to this you could cause days of work to be lost, or even machines to be corrupted. You may also need ribs of steel to cope with the chuckling.

I want you to cast your mind back to the days when the dot com era was ending. The company I was working for was waiting for more venture capital to stay afloat, and during this lull of uncertainty there wasn't a great deal of development work to do so most of the day was spent not working.

One of the ways to cheer up the day was hacking into other user's machines and changing the execute permissions on some of the system executables (explorer.exe for example).

Another game we affectionately titled: System Kerplunk.

Kerplunk was a game from our childhood where you had to pull sticks, placed horizontally, from a tube, resting on top of the sticks were marbles. The idea of the game was to not pull any sticks that might accidentally cause the marbles to fall.

With our version of System Kerplunk the idea was for a few people to target a coworker, who is obviously unaware, and kill processes on their machine.

There are two aims for the game:

• Avoid suspicion - if you get caught killing processes you're out of the game.
• The player who causes a bluescreen is the loser.

To play the game you'll need administrator rights to a coworker's machine, PsKill and PsList.
You'll probably want some kind of IM so that the players can keep in touch.
And let's not forget that you'll also need a coworker with a sense of humour... or not :)

Any process can be targeted but bear in mind if you kill Word.exe the coworker will lose their work.

Following on from the last entry I made on friday the 13th I was reminded today of a classic 13th date time gotcha:

A work colleague couldn't understand some strange behaviour with a function - the function was working yesterday but today - it's stopped. Strange we looked into it and found that the error was with a date conversion routine. Then the penny dropped . The reason was that a month had been set using the day of the month field. obviously there isn't a 13th month. Once the cause was found the solution followed.

The issue was a problem with the default language setting for a user on SQL Server.

I've just found this piece of sql to convert a recordset into csv I've never seen this being used anywhere before. The equivalent of Array.join(",") it never ceases to amaze me how powerful computer languages are.

It's especially useful to me as I was looking for exactly this earlier this week. I decided to go away and think about it, I'm glad I did!

I've created a bookmarklet that will allow you to view any hidden fields on a webpage.

I find this useful for examining all the data that I am about to send through in a form post. The code creates a new input element for each hidden one and calles the replaceChild() function on the parent. This is because in IE you are unable to change the type property of an input element.

The form submission should then work with the hidden fields converted to text fields, as the name attribute will have been replicated.

Convert hidden inputs to text

To add them to your favourites / bookmarks right click the link and choose add to favourites / bookmarks. In IE you may get a warning and if you don't trust me don't add the link to favourites. There's no reason to trust me, you don't know me.

In our second week we visited the seaside resort of La Baule This town is absolutely gorgeous the market is open everyday and being British the choice of food on display is mind numbing. When we get told that we have great supermarkets able to provide everything - When you go to a French market and see more variety in an area the size of a double bed compared to the football size area of the typical vegetable section in a British Supermarket then you start to realise why food in this country is so poor.

Anyway the first night we were there we visited the "Restaurant La Marechal" which was diabolical. The service was awful, we were tucked around the corner away from the other guests, the food order was taken incorrectly, the delivery was slapdash, Mum did get what we thought was the right cheese dish but it was missing the salad. Now when you consider that for the same amount price that we ate at La Table d'O then you can understand why La Marechal was so awful. There's absolutely no good reason to treat your staff with disrespect.

To top it off the staff refused to speak to us in French!

Following on from the previous entry, there is another restaurant which certainly stood out in Josselin and that was La Pelican. Mainly serving fish and very rustic, the food was excellent.

This restaurant is certainly not touristique, but nevertheless the value for money here far exceeding most restaurants in the region. It's quite incredible that for €12 you can get a 3 course meal that in this country you'd be looking to pay more than twice as much.

There was no English spoken here but the staff are friendly and even if you picked you meal blind folded you'd still be very happy.

La Table d'O in Josselin in the heart of Brittany was a fantastic meal. It was simply the best meal at a restaurant I have ever had.

I had the 'Délices de saison' and from that menu I chose the 'Millefeuille de Saumon' which was layers of poached salmon and pastry with I think new shoots of leek, astounding. I then had the 'Jarret de Veau'. Now I don't want to sound like a second rate restaurant reviewer but the 'Rosace de Tête de Moine' was amazing, it was like a curl of cheese, as though the chef was carving a bowl on a lathe.

So the food was great and the staff were excellent. Very often in France when you go for a meal, the staff realise you are English speaking and then continue to offer you a translation of everything, which is quite unnecessary especially when you're still learning the language. But the staff at La Table d'O were good enough to realise this and although their English was excellent they spoke French to us and only translated when necessary.

I have to recommend that if anyone is in the region of Josselin then this restaurant is well worth a visit.

Well actually I've been back for a week now, but haven't had the impetus to write any entries or get in touch with anyone. I thought that the longer I could ignore things the longer the holiday would seem. And I was right!

France was absolutely fantastic we ate incredibly well, drank some gorgeous wines , devoured some of the best paté and cheeses, and even managed to get some sun.

I've had a couple of questions regarding how to (un)install the CSS-Edit using regsvr32.

regsvr32 is a tool you can use which allows you to register COM objects with your computer. Basically you can have a COM object on your machine but if you haven't registered it then in general it will never get used. The CSS editor is a COM object and for it to get used with Internet Explorer it must be registered. To register the object you must open a command prompt, and if for example you have put the cssedit.dll file in c:\dlls\ then you would type:

regsvr32 c:\dlls\cssedit.dll

To unregister CSS - edit you must type:

regsvr32 -u c:\dlls\cssedit.dll

Obviously change the c:\dlls\ to be the location that you have actually placed the DLL.

I now have to go and wait for my car to be picked up as our new C3 has lost all power and needs to go to the garage - who ever said that having a new car is hassle free!

One of the feature I find really useful in WindowsXP is the ability to group similar taskbar buttons. At the moment I have 23 seperate windows on the taskbar but because I am able to group them together it means I have 14 items - which is more manageable.

However, recently I've been running Word more often and this has been causing serious interaction problems with Outlook, particularly when writing emails - It seems that because word is the editor for emails then the email window gets itself grouped under with other word documents rather than outlook. Now I can get used to this, but sadly the behaviour isn't consistent:

If you are editing a word document and choose to File -> Send To -> Mail Recipient (As Attachment) then the email window now gets grouped under the Outlook application.

According to Raymond Chen the taskbar groups buttons from data held in the underlying resource program - so how can this change depending on where the email program is launched from?

Every morning I when I come back to my computer, I notice that I have an automatic update ready to install. I always check which security hole this is designed to fill and for about 2 weeks now I've been getting the same update even though it has been installed.

I thought that this could have been because I haven't rebooted between updates - but having rebooted my machine I notice that the update is still there. The update in question is KB823718.

Having googled for it, it seems that this install is failing each time because my system isn't running the same version of MDAC - so why oh why has automatic updates downloaded this patch?

Only 2 more full working days left before my fortnight of holiday begins. I'm a bit disappointed - I was under the impression that the Tour de France was passing through the town where we are staying - however having checked the maps it passes about 80 Km to the north of us so it looks like we may miss the excitement. We've still got the Bastille Day celebrations to look forward to, it'll be my first time in France for this so I'm really looking forward to seeing what happens.

Arrgg!! Something's just reminded me of how infuriating the weekend was in terms of deliveries - we were expecting our new fireplace to be delivered from B&Q on the weekend and only 3 of 4 items were delivered - the piece missing was only the most important part of the jogsaw. We bought the fireplace online and in this respect B&Q now has the worst record of worst online delivery service. Second after putting our new oven into its new place in the new kitchen we came to put the shelves in and found that they hadn't been shipped. This was bought from COMET and it turns out that they are unable to get hold of replacment parts for 2 weeks. I don't really want to mention my our missing hob.

I'm hoping that things in the office will have livened up by the time I get back everything here has turned really sluggish recently.

I was sent this email today:

According to Jscript, there are only 23 hours in the day 28/03/2004, and 25 hours in 31/10/2004

The following WSH code shows this

WScript.Echo((new Date(2004, 2, 29).valueOf() – new Date(2004, 2, 28).valueOf()) / (1000 * 60 * 60));

WScript.Echo((new Date(2004, 10, 1).valueOf() – new Date(2004, 9, 31).valueOf()) / (1000 * 60 * 60));

I ran the script and it's true. But a bug it most certainly isn't. Took me a while to work out what was going on - the first misdirection I stumbled on was something to do with leap days (The month parameter of the Date constructor is zero based btw.)

I'll post the answer up sometime later.

One thing which really annoys me are dialog boxes or messageboxes, which belong to a separate application, that popup modally. That is to say they show at the top of the window stack. Picture the scene: I'm trying to hit a tight deadline - concentrating like a juice machine and I get a messagebox just at the time I start a new line of code. What did the message say? Argh does my head in.

Also what irritates more is when you're typing something in one window and another window pops up to the top of the stack and steals the focus from the window you were typing in so you end up finishing a sentence or line of code in the new window press the enter key for the new line and you've accidentally sent some code to someone who just wanted to know if you'd like to start a game of checkers.

I'd never considered before that there could be a security issue involved in this but having read this Jesse Ruderman article I realise that it could be a serious issue.

One generally considers that security issues involve buffer overflows, and code errors. But this social hacking is much more serious as it's more difficult for software writers to code against. A buffer overflow can be patched but a stupid user is a law unto themselves. In circumstance like the above, there are things that can be done by the software writer. Disabling the default action for a modal dialog would be one.